The IRS is facing new scrutiny after a government watchdog found the agency lost millions of tax records containing sensitive information. Those tax records come from two different agency storage facilities in California and Utah and involve both business and individual tax records reportedly from the fiscal year 2010.
According to the watchdog investigating the records, the taxpayer and tax information that has disappeared contains key information that can be used to commit tax fraud and identity theft.
The information was being stored on backup cartridges that were held inside boxes.
Some boxes that were once full of cartridges are now empty, and some cartridges said to be shipped from California to another IRS processing center in Kansas City could not be accounted for.
The agency believes the records could still potentially pop up somewhere. As for how this happened, the IRS blames a reduction in its staffing.
The IRS is no stranger to scrutiny, specifically from the GOP. In 2021, the IRS destroyed 30 million unprocessed paper tax returns as a quick fix to relieve a backlog of documents. When House and Senate Republicans pressed the agency on it, it declined to say how the destruction of records was decided.
The GOP’s distrust in the IRS has been ongoing for years, so much so that when the country was negotiating over the nation’s debt, the party successfully cut IRS funding by $21 billion.
